


Tinderbox

by stackcats



Category: Black Sails
Genre: First Time, Kinda, M/M, end of S4?, finale speculation, sex on a desk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 20:14:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7588498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stackcats/pseuds/stackcats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their battle against England - and their friendship - drawing to its inevitable close, Silver has one item of unfinished business with Flint</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tinderbox

This thing, whatever it was, is unraveling fast. Defeat is imminent. Dash flint against steel and you could set the world on fire. The patina of precious metal is corroding, exposing the iron within. It won’t be long now until Silver is nothing more than a name, and the timbers around us are smouldering. A little rum to flare the inferno, a confined room in which to trap the heat, and the Captain, already smouldering around the edges, ready to combust.

As a boy, I never could resist putting my hand into the flame.

We’re on the precipice. It’ll be tomorrow. Captain Flint will either die, or he’ll disappear beneath the waves, swallowed up by the sea. We both know there’s no winning this war. What we’re fighting for now isn’t victory. For some men it’s honour, for others it’s anger. For him, it’s something else. Perhaps this is the only thing he knows how to do. Perhaps he can’t change. He certainly cannot yield. All that’s left for him to do is burn up and take as many people down with him as he possible can.

But tomorrow is hours away, and we have unfinished business, he and I. It could be left unfinished, and I have considered it. Let him go, concede what I could never have. Watch, mourn, and move on. But the easy way is no longer my way, and fuck it - I _want_ him.

Salt stings, but it heals. Seems to hurt less if you rub it into the wound intentionally. Do it yourself, be the master of your own pain, your own recovery. I could wait for his attention to turn toward me in his own time, but his papers and instruments can do nothing for him now, and so I admit myself to his cabin and slide the iron bolt home.

I can taste the salt on his lip before we join, and when we do it flares sharp and warms my tongue. There’s no hesitation, no surprise. He pushes up away from the desk, kisses me with an intensity I can’t deny I’d hoped for. The usual hesitant exploration of the first kiss is non-existent; in its place a keen urgency. We’ve wasted a lot of time getting to this point. There’s a lot to make up for, a lot of ground to cover, so many things left to express before the world we’ve built boils away beneath our feet.

He’s every bit as I expected. In fact, it feels as though we’ve done this a hundred times before. I find that my hands know the lines of his body, that I know exactly where he needs to be touched, despite never before sharing this level of intimacy with him. And I’m not alone in this. He’s experiencing the exact same thing, and looks at me with a thrill in his eyes as he hones in on all my weak spots, of which there are many. He knows how to unlock every single one of them, he just knows it as if he read it in one of his books. Perhaps we are just that compatible, perhaps this is how stone and metal simply _are_ with each other when buried together deep beneath the earth. Whatever it is, however he does it, I'm tragically defenceless to his touch. His hand in my hair draws his name from my tongue, the slide of his thigh against mine flares passion in my gut, and the sight of him responding to me in kind, with his eyes wild and his breath coming in short, snatched gasps, could easily be my undoing. And I almost went without this! Almost turned from him without experiencing this at least once.

But, deft as he is at finding my every weakness, there's one of his I’m still hunting for. Some small resistance in him, a pressure I have to relieve. I find the clue to it in his hand on my chest, the dip of his head to bite at my stubbled jaw, the arch of his back as I grab at his shirt and pull it off him. I know what he wants, and when I've worked him with my hand into a state of breathless lust I grab him by the belt and push him round against the desk. He goes easily, braces his hands against the weather-beaten wood, and spreads his legs. It’s not until he laughs, low and rough, that I realise I'm swearing out loud.

His belt is unbuckled but it's up to me to shove his trousers down, which I try to do at the same time as unfastening my own. Flint growls at me, and I snap in response - I'm working as fast as possible, I want him _now_ damn it, but it's not fast enough for him and he's getting shitty with me. It doesn't help - the timbre of his frustration is going straight to my cock, and this isn't fucking easy for me to begin with, but once I've got him free of his trousers I can lean my weight against him while I drop my own. The hardest part is spitting in my hand and sliding my fingers between his cheeks. The angle is just wrong paired with the motion of the ship around us, and I have to cling onto his shoulder awkwardly, but he insists he needs little preparation.

As soon as I move into position, all difficulty evaporates. I belong here in this moment. My captain takes any weight I can’t support, and I’m home in just a few careful thrusts of my hips. As in all things, Flint knows precisely what he is doing, and his body offers little resistance. I’ve never been closer to him than in this moment. I press my lips to his neck, slide my hands down his sides, and feel him hot and needy beneath me. A couple more rolls of my hips and he’s groaning, spreading open for me, pushing back against me. There’s nothing left in the world but me and him, the movement of our ship, the heat between us, our story reaching its final chapter. I want this to last, but free will is a thing of the past. It’s fast and rough, borderline brutal, and it’s only by some miracle that I outlast him. I’m glad that I do, that I have the wits to feel him tense around me, to slide my hand up his thigh and curl my fingers around his cock and stroke him through it. He curses my name and arches back against me, grabbing my arm to keep me from losing balance and allowing me to keep fucking him through it.

When he stills I slide out of him, grab for the support of the desk. He moves decisively, re-fastening his belt and reversing our positions, guiding me until I’m sitting back against the desk. I feel a mess of heat and hair and sweat, and not a little pain from what remains of my leg. I’m still rock hard and fucking _desperate_ , but I take the moment to stare up at Flint. He’s cast in shadow, jaw slack as he chases his breath, eyes hooded until he catches my gaze. He grins with all his teeth, steps forward, and sinks to his knees in front of me.

The world condenses even further. Nothing exists now except my captain’s hands and lips and tongue. He anchors himself with a firm hold on my hip and swallows me down, and I hear myself cry out. I barely know what I’m saying, but I can’t stop talking, telling him how fucking good he is, how I need him, how I love him. I don’t even know if it’s true, but in that moment it’s true enough. Besides, it doesn’t matter how I feel. It’s all unraveling. I come with an incoherent shout, the unearthly pleasure of release skewered by the cold, blunt realisation that this is _it_. This is the end of Captain Flint and Long John Silver.

He seems as reluctant as I to let the moment slip away from us. He kisses my belly as he pulls himself back to his feet, and I reach for him instinctively, slide a hand behind his neck and draw him close. The scratch of his beard against my own, the brush of his lips on mine, the touch of his fingers against my chest. His oceanic eyes are filled with pain, and I know he sees it reflected back to him in mine. We hold each other as the world spins on, as the wind drops and the motion changes and the sailors without bellow to each other. Everything stills. We could fight for this, we could fasten our grip on each other, we could claim this as _ours_ and defy the world to take it from us, but…

…But it’s all right. He looks at me with an odd clarity. Tilts his head to kiss me once more, and I respond but the fire is spluttering its last dying embers into the night. The cold rolls back in. The moment has passed and when our eyes meet again there’s understanding between us. We are, finally, in equilibrium. Tomorrow is coming. Tomorrow, one way or the other, Captain Flint will cease to be. Tomorrow I will meet up with Madi and she and I will be done with New Providence Island for good. Tomorrow, the war will end and I will close this chapter of my life. And that’s all right. I’ve accepted it already. I never could delve deep enough to truly connect with James McGraw, and Captain Flint is not a man to be kept or changed. I think I love him, but I may as well love the rolling waves and the salt spray and all the currents of all the oceans for all they are capable of loving me back. They would sooner drown me in their depths, I think. Flint would drown me, surely, in his. He would feed me to his sharks and tear himself to shreds over it.

I was wrong about something, though. I won’t be the end of him. His end was written more than ten years ago, signed by a lord and an admiral, and in the end he will obey them. He will vanish. They will win. All because he is as inflexible, as stubborn, as resistant to change as his enemies. The world will move on without him, and those who knew him will start to forget. But I won’t be the end of him. I’ll tell his story, and I’ll keep him alive in the imaginations of anyone who’ll listen. I think he’d prefer me not to, but I’ll do it nonetheless.

He looks a little different to my eyes now. A little more human, perhaps. Smaller, maybe. He’s never looked clearer, never sharper. The red of his beard, the cut of his jaw, the pride in his eyes. I see him, and I think he sees me too. I wonder what he sees, exactly, if he finally realises what I’ve known for some time – that he is a player in _my_ story, not I in his. I can’t know for sure, and he isn’t telling.

I watch him snatch his shirt up from the floor and pull it on over his head. He rounds the desk, resettles everything we disturbed, strokes a hand across a map and picks up a pen to resume his notes. There were one or two details he couldn't cement until we were close enough to assess weather and the lay of the land. With the wind unexpectedly dropping, he'll have some revisions to make to his timing. Ordinarily I'd attempt to take an interest, but it's clear that I have been wordlessly dismissed, though the time when I felt beholden to his command has passed. Nonetheless, I’ll obey. A lover’s dismissal is harder to ignore than a commander’s. I straighten my clothes, tug my fingers through my hair, and once I’m satisfied no-one could guess what I’ve been doing in here I head for the door.

“Mr Silver.” My name has never sounded so soft on his tongue. My body betrays me, a shiver running through me as I turn to look at him again.

But he just smiles, a sad and difficult smile, heaves a sigh, and turns his gaze back to his work.

I wonder if I’ll ever be this close to him again. Will this be the last I see of him? It’s possible, even probable, but if so, well – it could’ve been worse.

The world turns and carries me away from James Flint. I close the door behind myself. 


End file.
